The report released today by the Prime Minster, a report commissioned in June from mpconsulting, confirms what all informed and moderate people (especially us) have said, which is that nothing has really changed since the unanimous vote against cloning in 2002 - so why reopen the issue?
The report shows that the Lockhart Committee’s recommendations to lift the ban were based not on any scientific advance, but on two things outside their brief: their own ethical prejudice that it is acceptable to create embryos solely for research, and their unsubstantiated wish list of what cloning might achieve.[i]
This report confirms that there has been no significant scientific advance to make the case for cloning any better than it was in 2002 – and it was rejected back then by a unanimous vote of Parliament. The only new development since 2002 has been the granting of undue decision making power to an unelected and unrepresentative group of six citizens. A group who share the same radical ethical mindset in favour of permitting cloning, and animal-human hybrids, and any other inhuman experiment that scientists might request. A group whose current Chair, Loane Skene, is, as we have seen, also advisor to the world’s leading cloning lobby group.
Significantly, this report notes that the one allegedly significant scientific advance that Lockhart used to justify overturning our ban turned out, within days of tabling the Lockhart report (tabled Dec 19th 2005), to be a monumental fraud.
Because the Korean experiment under Prof Hwang was the one and only ‘authenticated’ case of cloning anywhere in the world[ii], the whole case for there being ‘scientific advances in cloning’ collapsed with the collapse of Hwang’s fraud. Therefore, the Lockhart recommendations are factually fatally flawed, and should have been withdrawn the day it was discovered (Dec 23rd 2005) that the Korean claims were fraudulent.
This report confirms that there is no new scientific reason to permit cloning – only the old justification, used to great effect in 2002, that miracle cures for Alzheimer’s are sure to come if only you allow scientists to clone, hybridise with animals, and in other ways further violate our humanity.
The public was fooled once; to listen to the Lockhart Lobby recommendations would be to be fooled twice. This new critique helps us see how groundless – scientifically as well as ethically - the Lockhart recommendations really are.
_________________________________________
[i] Recommendation 23 of Lockhart Report
Human somatic cell nuclear transfer should be permitted, under licence, to create and use human embryo clones for research, training and clinical application…
Comment by mpconsulting:
Since the Committee published its Report there have been some further developments which have discredited the work of the South Korean researchers. On the basis of advice from the NHMRC it would not appear that there have been any other scientific developments relevant to the question of whether the ban on the creation of embryos by SCNT should be lifted.
Despite this, it is clear that there have been developments since the legislation was introduced in 2002. However, it does not appear that these developments particularly influenced the Committee’s recommendations regarding the creation and use of embryos using SCNT. Rather the Committee’s considerations appeared to be based around the potential of SCNT for the treatment of illness and the Committee’s own resolution of the ethical issues rather than an assessment of the state of the science as at a certain point in time.
[ii] Note: The fact remains that there has not been a single confirmed case of human cloning anywhere in the world, and certainly no case even claiming to have obtained stem cells from cloned embryos. There has been no significant ‘advance’. The only case to have been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal was the Korean cloning fraud. Other claims – from the UK and China – have not been confirmed or given the status of a peer-reviewed finding, and therefore cannot be considered authentic under normal medical standards of research.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
The Great Lie at the heart of the cloning debate
It gets worse. We saw yesterday that Professor Loane Skene, acting Chair of the Lockhart Review Committee which recommended so-called ‘therapeutic’ cloning for Australia, has a conflict of interest in also being bound to represent the views of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. That is, to promote cloning.
But not just promote it through honest argument. The ISSCR promotes it through tried and true Orwellian methods of verbal engineering.
Just how closely was the acting Chair of our ‘disinterested’, open-minded Committee complicit in the organised lying – and I do not use those words lightly - of her Society at its meeting last year in San Francisco?
Not just any old lie. The grand, central lie of the cloning debate, the lie that alone has the power to turn a unanimous vote against the creation of human embryos by cloning, to a victory for cloning – and they know it. A very-nearly-evil lie that has as its goal the stripping of humanity from a human creature which could, like Dolly the sheep, be born as a baby, and reducing that human creature to a mere laboratory animal, meat for the consumption of science.
The lie: ‘that cloning does not create a human embryo’.
Remember that the cloning lobby has been faced with principled resistance here and overseas to the deliberate creation of human embryos for destructive research. Our Parliament in 2002 permitted research on ‘surplus’ IVF embryos, on the grounds that they were ‘going to die anyway’, but drew the ethical line at deliberately creating new embryos solely for experimentation. The United Nations last year likewise called on all member states to prohibit all forms of human cloning, with one delegate expressing the principle as: "No human life should ever be produced to be destroyed for the benefit of another."
The cloning lobby’s audacious way around this ethical roadblock? Simply to agree amongst themselves, and teach the public, that the cloned embryo is not really an embryo after all. Therefore it is hardly human. Therefore there is no ethical issue in creating or destroying it.
And the think tank that dreamt up this deception, and has taught the public to believe that no human embryo is created by cloning? The International Society for Stem Cell Research, represented on our Lockhart Committee by Loane Skene, ethical advisor to the ISSCR.
We know exactly when and where the plot was hatched: the June 2005 meeting of the ISSCR in San Francisco.
We know because their anti-scientific, grubbily political strategy was exposed in a hard-hitting editorial in the leading journal Nature, July 2005[i], entitled Playing the Name Game: Stem-cell scientists should not try to change the definition of the word ‘embryo’.
Nature accused scientists of “playing semantic games in an effort to evade scrutiny” and restated the biological truth that the entity created by cloning was just the same as the entity created by IVF fertilisation:
“Whether taken from a fertility clinic or made through cloning, a blastocyst embryo has the potential to become a fully functional organism. And appearing to deny that fact will not fool die-hard opponents of this research. If anything, it will simply open up scientists to the accusation that they are trying to distance themselves from difficult moral issues by changing the terms of the debate.”
Got that? An embryo is an embryo no matter how it is made. Cloning is simply one way of making an embryo; uniting egg and sperm is another. Each looks like an embryo, each grows like an embryo – each is an embryo.
AH! BUT WHERE’S THE SPERM???
Just how easily the public can be misled by tricksy scientists was exemplified in an Australian radio report on the Korean cloning story, 20th May 2005:
“The announcement from the South Korean scientists is a breakthrough without an ethical dilemma because the researchers did not use a fertilised egg to create the embryonic stem cells. So a human embryo was never actually created.[ii]”
When I spoke to the journalist to correct her basic biology – for which she was duly grateful – she simply said, “we just took that off the wire” – pre-packaged by the cloning lobby for public deception.
The next day, 21st May in the Sydney Morning Herald, we had an equally astonishing misrepresentation of the facts from a Melbourne Professor of Genetics who had no excuse:
“Professor Williamson said the technique reproduced genetic material from a living person and the intermediate cellular products should not be called embryos, because they were not formed by the union of egg and sperm.”
No sperm, therefore no embryos! Therefore no ethical issue! This piece of biological drivel has greatly impressed MPs in the Coalition Party Room through the mouthpiece of Dr Mal Washer. ‘Trust him’, they think to themselves, ‘he’s a doctor’ – but on this one, MPs would be well advised to get a second opinion.
The second opinion is that yes, using egg and sperm is one way of creating an embryo, the good old-fashioned way - but there are now at least two other ways of reaching the same end point: parthenogenesis, and SCNT cloning.
You would think that Washer, an MP, would at least be aware of the definition of ‘embryo’ in the relevant Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002. The explanatory notes to that Act make clear that the definition of the word ‘embryo’:
“is intended to include: a) a human embryo created by the fertilisation of a human egg by human sperm. b) a human embryo that has had its development initiated by any means other than by the fertilisation of a human egg by human sperm.”
See? Sperm are not the only show in town. There are other means of making an embryo.
The explanatory notes specify such ‘other means’ including SCNT cloning:
“ a human egg that has had its nucleus replaced by the nucleus of a somatic cell (ie a cell from the body) by the process referred to as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT); and a parthenogenetic human embryo.”
Too true, Drs Washer and Williamson, the old medical dictionaries do state that an ‘embryo’ arises from the ‘union of egg and sperm’ – but dammit, that’ was because there was no other way back then of making an embryo! Now the dictionaries – and your own honest medical advice, perhaps – should be true to the times we live in, when there are different ways of making an embryo. Unless you have another reason for not being true to the facts?
IT’S AN EMBRYO, STUPID!
Look to our own Lockhart Committee – which did not obscure the basic biological facts the way Williamson and Washer do. In its final recommendations (see hyperlink) the Lockhart Committee acknowledged the biological fact that such a clone is of course a human embryo, and noted that the cloned embryo could, ‘given the right environment’ be born:
“The Committee agreed that human embryo clones are human embryos and that, given the right environment for development, could develop into a human being. Furthermore, if such an embryo were implanted into the body of a woman to achieve a pregnancy, this entity would certainly have the same status as any other human embryo, and were this pregnancy to result in a live birth, that child would enjoy the same rights and protection as any other child.” (page 170).
The campaign to dehumanise the cloned embryo is an international one, and in May last year one of our greatest living ethicists, a Jewish intellectual and head of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass, pleaded for honesty in public discourse about cloning:
“If we are properly to evaluate the ethics of this research and where it might lead, we must call things by their right names and not disguise what is going on with euphemism or misleading nomenclature. The initial product of the (Korean) cloning technique is without doubt a living cloned human embryo, the functional equivalent of a fertilised egg.” [iii]
If people are worried that he was on Bush’s Council and therefore suspect, equally truthful nomenclature was also used by former President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Its 1997 report Cloning Human Beings, explicitly stated:
“The Commission began its discussions fully recognizing that any effort in humans to transfer a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg involves the creation of an embryo, with the apparent potential to be implanted in utero and developed to term.”
One could usefully adapt a phrase of that former President and sky-write over the Federal Parliament, “It’s an embryo, stupid”, in the face of all attempts to fool our representatives by misleading nomenclature.
This is tragic. Lies that are aimed to exclude the cloned embryo from the circle of human care, from any sense of belonging in the human family, are influencing decent people in Parliament. It must be that Senator Kay Paterson has come to believe this scientific absurdity, this cynical lie. How else do we explain her transformation from the MP in 2002 who made this stirring statement of ethical principle…
“I believe strongly that it is wrong to create human embryos solely for research. It is not morally permissible to develop an embryo with the intent of truncating it at an early stage for the benefit of another human being. However, utilising embryos that are excess to a couple's needs after a successful implantation is a very different matter.”
…into the MP who is drafting a Bill precisely ‘to create human embryos solely for research’ and to destroy one life for the benefit of another?
This dehumanising lie must be brought to light, and the perpetrators – as far back as Loane Skene’s ISSCR – shamed.
[i] Nature 436, 2 (7 July 2005) doi: 10.1038/436002b
[ii] ABC Radio, PM, 20th May 2005.
[iii] Kass in New York Times, May 29th 2005.
But not just promote it through honest argument. The ISSCR promotes it through tried and true Orwellian methods of verbal engineering.
Just how closely was the acting Chair of our ‘disinterested’, open-minded Committee complicit in the organised lying – and I do not use those words lightly - of her Society at its meeting last year in San Francisco?
Not just any old lie. The grand, central lie of the cloning debate, the lie that alone has the power to turn a unanimous vote against the creation of human embryos by cloning, to a victory for cloning – and they know it. A very-nearly-evil lie that has as its goal the stripping of humanity from a human creature which could, like Dolly the sheep, be born as a baby, and reducing that human creature to a mere laboratory animal, meat for the consumption of science.
The lie: ‘that cloning does not create a human embryo’.
Remember that the cloning lobby has been faced with principled resistance here and overseas to the deliberate creation of human embryos for destructive research. Our Parliament in 2002 permitted research on ‘surplus’ IVF embryos, on the grounds that they were ‘going to die anyway’, but drew the ethical line at deliberately creating new embryos solely for experimentation. The United Nations last year likewise called on all member states to prohibit all forms of human cloning, with one delegate expressing the principle as: "No human life should ever be produced to be destroyed for the benefit of another."
The cloning lobby’s audacious way around this ethical roadblock? Simply to agree amongst themselves, and teach the public, that the cloned embryo is not really an embryo after all. Therefore it is hardly human. Therefore there is no ethical issue in creating or destroying it.
And the think tank that dreamt up this deception, and has taught the public to believe that no human embryo is created by cloning? The International Society for Stem Cell Research, represented on our Lockhart Committee by Loane Skene, ethical advisor to the ISSCR.
We know exactly when and where the plot was hatched: the June 2005 meeting of the ISSCR in San Francisco.
We know because their anti-scientific, grubbily political strategy was exposed in a hard-hitting editorial in the leading journal Nature, July 2005[i], entitled Playing the Name Game: Stem-cell scientists should not try to change the definition of the word ‘embryo’.
Nature accused scientists of “playing semantic games in an effort to evade scrutiny” and restated the biological truth that the entity created by cloning was just the same as the entity created by IVF fertilisation:
“Whether taken from a fertility clinic or made through cloning, a blastocyst embryo has the potential to become a fully functional organism. And appearing to deny that fact will not fool die-hard opponents of this research. If anything, it will simply open up scientists to the accusation that they are trying to distance themselves from difficult moral issues by changing the terms of the debate.”
Got that? An embryo is an embryo no matter how it is made. Cloning is simply one way of making an embryo; uniting egg and sperm is another. Each looks like an embryo, each grows like an embryo – each is an embryo.
AH! BUT WHERE’S THE SPERM???
Just how easily the public can be misled by tricksy scientists was exemplified in an Australian radio report on the Korean cloning story, 20th May 2005:
“The announcement from the South Korean scientists is a breakthrough without an ethical dilemma because the researchers did not use a fertilised egg to create the embryonic stem cells. So a human embryo was never actually created.[ii]”
When I spoke to the journalist to correct her basic biology – for which she was duly grateful – she simply said, “we just took that off the wire” – pre-packaged by the cloning lobby for public deception.
The next day, 21st May in the Sydney Morning Herald, we had an equally astonishing misrepresentation of the facts from a Melbourne Professor of Genetics who had no excuse:
“Professor Williamson said the technique reproduced genetic material from a living person and the intermediate cellular products should not be called embryos, because they were not formed by the union of egg and sperm.”
No sperm, therefore no embryos! Therefore no ethical issue! This piece of biological drivel has greatly impressed MPs in the Coalition Party Room through the mouthpiece of Dr Mal Washer. ‘Trust him’, they think to themselves, ‘he’s a doctor’ – but on this one, MPs would be well advised to get a second opinion.
The second opinion is that yes, using egg and sperm is one way of creating an embryo, the good old-fashioned way - but there are now at least two other ways of reaching the same end point: parthenogenesis, and SCNT cloning.
You would think that Washer, an MP, would at least be aware of the definition of ‘embryo’ in the relevant Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002. The explanatory notes to that Act make clear that the definition of the word ‘embryo’:
“is intended to include: a) a human embryo created by the fertilisation of a human egg by human sperm. b) a human embryo that has had its development initiated by any means other than by the fertilisation of a human egg by human sperm.”
See? Sperm are not the only show in town. There are other means of making an embryo.
The explanatory notes specify such ‘other means’ including SCNT cloning:
“ a human egg that has had its nucleus replaced by the nucleus of a somatic cell (ie a cell from the body) by the process referred to as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT); and a parthenogenetic human embryo.”
Too true, Drs Washer and Williamson, the old medical dictionaries do state that an ‘embryo’ arises from the ‘union of egg and sperm’ – but dammit, that’ was because there was no other way back then of making an embryo! Now the dictionaries – and your own honest medical advice, perhaps – should be true to the times we live in, when there are different ways of making an embryo. Unless you have another reason for not being true to the facts?
IT’S AN EMBRYO, STUPID!
Look to our own Lockhart Committee – which did not obscure the basic biological facts the way Williamson and Washer do. In its final recommendations (see hyperlink) the Lockhart Committee acknowledged the biological fact that such a clone is of course a human embryo, and noted that the cloned embryo could, ‘given the right environment’ be born:
“The Committee agreed that human embryo clones are human embryos and that, given the right environment for development, could develop into a human being. Furthermore, if such an embryo were implanted into the body of a woman to achieve a pregnancy, this entity would certainly have the same status as any other human embryo, and were this pregnancy to result in a live birth, that child would enjoy the same rights and protection as any other child.” (page 170).
The campaign to dehumanise the cloned embryo is an international one, and in May last year one of our greatest living ethicists, a Jewish intellectual and head of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass, pleaded for honesty in public discourse about cloning:
“If we are properly to evaluate the ethics of this research and where it might lead, we must call things by their right names and not disguise what is going on with euphemism or misleading nomenclature. The initial product of the (Korean) cloning technique is without doubt a living cloned human embryo, the functional equivalent of a fertilised egg.” [iii]
If people are worried that he was on Bush’s Council and therefore suspect, equally truthful nomenclature was also used by former President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Its 1997 report Cloning Human Beings, explicitly stated:
“The Commission began its discussions fully recognizing that any effort in humans to transfer a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg involves the creation of an embryo, with the apparent potential to be implanted in utero and developed to term.”
One could usefully adapt a phrase of that former President and sky-write over the Federal Parliament, “It’s an embryo, stupid”, in the face of all attempts to fool our representatives by misleading nomenclature.
This is tragic. Lies that are aimed to exclude the cloned embryo from the circle of human care, from any sense of belonging in the human family, are influencing decent people in Parliament. It must be that Senator Kay Paterson has come to believe this scientific absurdity, this cynical lie. How else do we explain her transformation from the MP in 2002 who made this stirring statement of ethical principle…
“I believe strongly that it is wrong to create human embryos solely for research. It is not morally permissible to develop an embryo with the intent of truncating it at an early stage for the benefit of another human being. However, utilising embryos that are excess to a couple's needs after a successful implantation is a very different matter.”
…into the MP who is drafting a Bill precisely ‘to create human embryos solely for research’ and to destroy one life for the benefit of another?
This dehumanising lie must be brought to light, and the perpetrators – as far back as Loane Skene’s ISSCR – shamed.
[i] Nature 436, 2 (7 July 2005) doi: 10.1038/436002b
[ii] ABC Radio, PM, 20th May 2005.
[iii] Kass in New York Times, May 29th 2005.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
HERE’S A STORY! LOCKHART CHAIR ADVISES WORLD CLONING LOBBY
Yesterday this blog established to everyone’s satisfaction that the acting Chair of the Lockhart committee, Loane Skene, is acting improperly by acting at all, since her statutory Committee officially dropped its final curtain on December 19th 2005. Continuing to trade on the name of a defunct Committee for purposes of political agitation does not respect the ‘disinterestedness’ of an expert advisory committee.
Today, that word ‘disinterestedness’ will be laughed off the stage.
Have you heard the joke about the Committee appointed to make a ‘disinterested’ inquiry into cloning, whose acting Chair is also an advisor to the world’s main lobby group for cloning? I kid you not.
Loane Skene is ethical advisor to the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) as recorded HERE. In that position she is, quote, “responsible for representing the Society’s ethical viewpoint” – which is a viewpoint advocating ‘therapeutic’ cloning, and nobody disputes that Skene fulfils her duty to the ISSCR very well. The obvious question is whether there is a conflict of duties – on the one hand to lobby for cloning on behalf of the ISSCR, and on the other to be a ‘disinterested’ and open-minded member of a statutory committee surveying public attitudes on cloning.
The ISSCR has been prominent in lobbying for cloning both at the international level (see HERE) and in the current Australian debate – where Prof Paul Simmons, currently President of the ISSCR, is one of the leading Australian advocates for cloning. He has had warm praise for Skene’s Committee recently, busy as it has been in lobbying for their shared goal of research cloning.
It gets funnier. Anyone with a Google can see that Skene was already on the record supporting so-called ‘therapeutic’ cloning as far back as 2000 – yet only ten days ago she told us that she entered the Lockhart Committee with no position on the matter!
The Age, August 19, 2006: "Loane Skene says she didn't have a position on therapeutic cloning when she joined the committee, though as a long-time participant in debates on the legalities and ethics of assisted reproduction, she was in favour of the pursuit of technologies that improve fertility. She says her views evolved through six months of reading the voluminous data and, more importantly, listening to submissions. 'I certainly changed my view. I can't speak for the others.'" End quote.
But Skene certainly did have a position on therapeutic cloning on the record as far back as 2000. She addressed the Federal Parliamentary Inquiry into the Scientific, Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Human Cloning in March 2000, and argued that there was no ethical objection to creating embryos for research by ‘therapeutic’ cloning: “Even if one regards reproductive cloning as contravening human dignity, surely the same is not true of therapeutic cloning.”
Indeed, in her clearly stated view, therapeutic cloning is justified by the possibility of gains for medical research. “One can best serve the ‘dignity of a person by trying to save the person’s life and health. I do not believe that any ‘dignity’ interest of the embryo outweighs the interests of a dying or diseased person”.
That, I submit, is not the statement of a person who “didn’t have a position on therapeutic cloning when she joined the (Lockhart) committee”!
It is, instead, a well presented position at one ethical pole of the current debate: that it is acceptable – even imperative - to create and destroy one human life (that of the cloned embryo) for the benefit of another life (that of the patient).
The acting Chair of the Lockhart Committee is, on the available evidence, a card-carrying cloning advocate who argued the case before a Parliamentary committee in 2000, and advises the world’s leading cloning lobby group, the ISSCR.
What then, are MPs and Senators to make of Skene’s claims to have had ‘no position prior to joining the committee’, indeed that her views only ‘evolved over 6 months’ under the kind tutelage of those who made submissions and gave testimony?
They are claims to an appearance of the ‘openmindedness’ befitting a ‘disinterested’ committee advising on a contentious subject. They are claims that will fool nobody.
Today, that word ‘disinterestedness’ will be laughed off the stage.
Have you heard the joke about the Committee appointed to make a ‘disinterested’ inquiry into cloning, whose acting Chair is also an advisor to the world’s main lobby group for cloning? I kid you not.
Loane Skene is ethical advisor to the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) as recorded HERE. In that position she is, quote, “responsible for representing the Society’s ethical viewpoint” – which is a viewpoint advocating ‘therapeutic’ cloning, and nobody disputes that Skene fulfils her duty to the ISSCR very well. The obvious question is whether there is a conflict of duties – on the one hand to lobby for cloning on behalf of the ISSCR, and on the other to be a ‘disinterested’ and open-minded member of a statutory committee surveying public attitudes on cloning.
The ISSCR has been prominent in lobbying for cloning both at the international level (see HERE) and in the current Australian debate – where Prof Paul Simmons, currently President of the ISSCR, is one of the leading Australian advocates for cloning. He has had warm praise for Skene’s Committee recently, busy as it has been in lobbying for their shared goal of research cloning.
It gets funnier. Anyone with a Google can see that Skene was already on the record supporting so-called ‘therapeutic’ cloning as far back as 2000 – yet only ten days ago she told us that she entered the Lockhart Committee with no position on the matter!
The Age, August 19, 2006: "Loane Skene says she didn't have a position on therapeutic cloning when she joined the committee, though as a long-time participant in debates on the legalities and ethics of assisted reproduction, she was in favour of the pursuit of technologies that improve fertility. She says her views evolved through six months of reading the voluminous data and, more importantly, listening to submissions. 'I certainly changed my view. I can't speak for the others.'" End quote.
But Skene certainly did have a position on therapeutic cloning on the record as far back as 2000. She addressed the Federal Parliamentary Inquiry into the Scientific, Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Human Cloning in March 2000, and argued that there was no ethical objection to creating embryos for research by ‘therapeutic’ cloning: “Even if one regards reproductive cloning as contravening human dignity, surely the same is not true of therapeutic cloning.”
Indeed, in her clearly stated view, therapeutic cloning is justified by the possibility of gains for medical research. “One can best serve the ‘dignity of a person by trying to save the person’s life and health. I do not believe that any ‘dignity’ interest of the embryo outweighs the interests of a dying or diseased person”.
That, I submit, is not the statement of a person who “didn’t have a position on therapeutic cloning when she joined the (Lockhart) committee”!
It is, instead, a well presented position at one ethical pole of the current debate: that it is acceptable – even imperative - to create and destroy one human life (that of the cloned embryo) for the benefit of another life (that of the patient).
The acting Chair of the Lockhart Committee is, on the available evidence, a card-carrying cloning advocate who argued the case before a Parliamentary committee in 2000, and advises the world’s leading cloning lobby group, the ISSCR.
What then, are MPs and Senators to make of Skene’s claims to have had ‘no position prior to joining the committee’, indeed that her views only ‘evolved over 6 months’ under the kind tutelage of those who made submissions and gave testimony?
They are claims to an appearance of the ‘openmindedness’ befitting a ‘disinterested’ committee advising on a contentious subject. They are claims that will fool nobody.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Lockhart Lobby Committee - get a Blog!
The acting Chair of the Lockhart Committee seems a little peeved that nobody is accepting her invitation for a sit down and a chat.
“I did say that I, and my fellow committee members, would welcome an invitation to come and talk to Cabinet about these issues," Professor Loane Skene told the Sunday Profile program on ABC Radio today. But it seems the desire for a meeting is unrequited - "No, we haven't heard from Mr Abbott, or from any of the other members of the Cabinet."
There are two good reasons why Cabinet should not feel it fitting to meet with Ms Skene or other Committee members.
First, her Committee does not exist. It is very bad form – in fact quite outrageous – for an advisory Committee, having tabled its advice, to keep buzzing round the ears of Government like a sticky fly. Such a Committee, once it has given its advice, effectively ceases to exist. It is an ex-parrot. It has done the job asked of it, and it goes home.
Not the Lockhart Lobby Committee, oh no! Skene, the acting Chair of a Committee that should no longer have an acting anything, reminds us today how very busy is the life of a lobbyist - "I've been making response in newspaper articles and on radio interviews, but I haven't been invited to talk to Mr Abbott himself," she said.
Not only Skene - one newspaper article was jointly signed by all members of the ex-committee! The audacity of an ex-advisory committee using ‘letterhead’ that is no longer theirs to use, to publish a piece pushing their radical views! And other ex-committee members, Marshall et al, also weigh into the debate at politically effective moments on behalf of ‘the Committee’.
Memo to the members of the former Lockhart Committee:
Poor form, chaps, to reduce the standing of an expert advisory committee to just another knockabout lobby group. Why don’t you get a blog like me!
More important, why did you fail to do the one honourable thing after publishing your Report – and pulp it? For, in the light of the Hwang cloning fraud, and the fact that Hwang was the sole foundation of your claim that science had advanced so much that the ban on cloning in Australia should be overturned, the whole edifice of your report has crashed to the ground.
It was extraordinary bad luck that, having published your report in mid-December, the Hwang fraud should be exposed only a matter of days later! How did you feel? To think, all that elaborate argument was founded on false premises – fake science, a pack of lies, and nothing else.
Sad indeed – but your way was clear. The report should have been withdrawn, pulped, and a reassessment made as to any ‘advance in cloning science’ that might warrant a review in Australia.
That would have produced, in disinterested hands, a very different report. For there has, of course, been no ‘advance’ in human cloning other than the Hwang fraud – not even a single peer-reviewed article - and that would have meant changing your advice to Government.
But a like-minded group such as yours with a shared passion for radical experiments on human embryos is not, it appears, for changing, and that meant not doing the right thing and withdrawing the report. Not surprisingly, an acting Chair who also acts as advisor to the International Stem Cell Society (did you note that, alert journalists with an eye to conflict of interest?) is not likely to give up easily on the battle for cloning.
Understand, though, why Cabinet is not feeling obliged to invite you for a chat. It is nothing personal. It is just that you don’t really exist any more, except as a lobby group like the rest of us, and it is hard to take tea with an illusion. Just as it is hard to take seriously a Report whose sole fraudulent scientific foundation is likewise an illusion.
“I did say that I, and my fellow committee members, would welcome an invitation to come and talk to Cabinet about these issues," Professor Loane Skene told the Sunday Profile program on ABC Radio today. But it seems the desire for a meeting is unrequited - "No, we haven't heard from Mr Abbott, or from any of the other members of the Cabinet."
There are two good reasons why Cabinet should not feel it fitting to meet with Ms Skene or other Committee members.
First, her Committee does not exist. It is very bad form – in fact quite outrageous – for an advisory Committee, having tabled its advice, to keep buzzing round the ears of Government like a sticky fly. Such a Committee, once it has given its advice, effectively ceases to exist. It is an ex-parrot. It has done the job asked of it, and it goes home.
Not the Lockhart Lobby Committee, oh no! Skene, the acting Chair of a Committee that should no longer have an acting anything, reminds us today how very busy is the life of a lobbyist - "I've been making response in newspaper articles and on radio interviews, but I haven't been invited to talk to Mr Abbott himself," she said.
Not only Skene - one newspaper article was jointly signed by all members of the ex-committee! The audacity of an ex-advisory committee using ‘letterhead’ that is no longer theirs to use, to publish a piece pushing their radical views! And other ex-committee members, Marshall et al, also weigh into the debate at politically effective moments on behalf of ‘the Committee’.
Memo to the members of the former Lockhart Committee:
Poor form, chaps, to reduce the standing of an expert advisory committee to just another knockabout lobby group. Why don’t you get a blog like me!
More important, why did you fail to do the one honourable thing after publishing your Report – and pulp it? For, in the light of the Hwang cloning fraud, and the fact that Hwang was the sole foundation of your claim that science had advanced so much that the ban on cloning in Australia should be overturned, the whole edifice of your report has crashed to the ground.
It was extraordinary bad luck that, having published your report in mid-December, the Hwang fraud should be exposed only a matter of days later! How did you feel? To think, all that elaborate argument was founded on false premises – fake science, a pack of lies, and nothing else.
Sad indeed – but your way was clear. The report should have been withdrawn, pulped, and a reassessment made as to any ‘advance in cloning science’ that might warrant a review in Australia.
That would have produced, in disinterested hands, a very different report. For there has, of course, been no ‘advance’ in human cloning other than the Hwang fraud – not even a single peer-reviewed article - and that would have meant changing your advice to Government.
But a like-minded group such as yours with a shared passion for radical experiments on human embryos is not, it appears, for changing, and that meant not doing the right thing and withdrawing the report. Not surprisingly, an acting Chair who also acts as advisor to the International Stem Cell Society (did you note that, alert journalists with an eye to conflict of interest?) is not likely to give up easily on the battle for cloning.
Understand, though, why Cabinet is not feeling obliged to invite you for a chat. It is nothing personal. It is just that you don’t really exist any more, except as a lobby group like the rest of us, and it is hard to take tea with an illusion. Just as it is hard to take seriously a Report whose sole fraudulent scientific foundation is likewise an illusion.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
ANIMAL-HUMAN HYBRID CLONES? WHO SAID THAT?!
Got the blog up and running in time to savour the sight of cloning advocates ducking for cover – pelted with the ‘Yuck factor’ of animal-human hybrids. Nobody wanted to own these little pets, at this politically sensitive time in their campaign.
"Hybrid and chimera sound terrible," says Megan Munsie, of the Melbourne based Stem Cell Sciences, in today’s Australian. (Hold on to your seat – we are in for some spin).
We are told these animal eggs contain only “traces of mitochondrial DNA”. Understandable attempt, Ms Munsie, at minimizing this little mess, but ‘traces’ is not true. The whole mitochondrial DNA of the rabbit or pig is present entire and functioning, and is incorporated into the animal-human hybrid embryo – in sufficient amounts, in animal cloning studies, to have the resultant ‘tailor-made’ stem cells suffer immune rejection as ‘foreign’. Says Muncie, "You're not talking about half animal, half human." Oh I see – only a teeny weeny bit of rabbit or pig-mother in that human embryo? Well I guess that’s OK then.
Let’s be honest about animal-human hybrid clones. Journalist Deborah Hope, in the above article, disingenuously points out that “Australian law prohibits animal-human hybrids” - but it is precisely that law which our Parliament is now being asked to overturn, along with the ban on cloning human embryos!
The Lockhart Review of our cloning laws itself recommends animal-human hybrid clones: “In order to reduce the need for human oocytes, transfer of human somatic cell nuclei into animal oocytes should be allowed”. See p.170 of the Report.
Likewise cloning advocate Prof Alan Trounson suggested using rabbit eggs to clone human embryos – a process which does indeed leave rabbit DNA in the embryo and makes the clone a human-animal hybrid.
Trounson said last year, “Since there are plenty of rabbit eggs around, if we could make that work it would remove the concern about accessing human eggs in any numbers”.
Accessing the thousands of human eggs needed for cloning risks the lives and wellbeing of women (through ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which killed one IVF patient last month in Britain), but the rabbit option Trounson pulled out of his hat is equally unthinkable.
Two options, then, for this wonderful new science of cloning: either commercialise women’s ovaries, putting at risk especially poorer women who will take money for their eggs – or settle for animal-human hybrid clones.
No human cloning! Cloning violates our humanity, not only in creating embryos who have no identifiable human mother – just an emptied out egg nearly devoid of her genetic identity – but in proposing the further dehumanisation of an animal egg where the mother’s egg should be.
The inhuman abuses of cloning are only just reaching public consciousness. Enough of the ducking and damage control by Muncie, ex-Premier Carr and others: let the truth of this filthy science be out.
"Hybrid and chimera sound terrible," says Megan Munsie, of the Melbourne based Stem Cell Sciences, in today’s Australian. (Hold on to your seat – we are in for some spin).
We are told these animal eggs contain only “traces of mitochondrial DNA”. Understandable attempt, Ms Munsie, at minimizing this little mess, but ‘traces’ is not true. The whole mitochondrial DNA of the rabbit or pig is present entire and functioning, and is incorporated into the animal-human hybrid embryo – in sufficient amounts, in animal cloning studies, to have the resultant ‘tailor-made’ stem cells suffer immune rejection as ‘foreign’. Says Muncie, "You're not talking about half animal, half human." Oh I see – only a teeny weeny bit of rabbit or pig-mother in that human embryo? Well I guess that’s OK then.
Let’s be honest about animal-human hybrid clones. Journalist Deborah Hope, in the above article, disingenuously points out that “Australian law prohibits animal-human hybrids” - but it is precisely that law which our Parliament is now being asked to overturn, along with the ban on cloning human embryos!
The Lockhart Review of our cloning laws itself recommends animal-human hybrid clones: “In order to reduce the need for human oocytes, transfer of human somatic cell nuclei into animal oocytes should be allowed”. See p.170 of the Report.
Likewise cloning advocate Prof Alan Trounson suggested using rabbit eggs to clone human embryos – a process which does indeed leave rabbit DNA in the embryo and makes the clone a human-animal hybrid.
Trounson said last year, “Since there are plenty of rabbit eggs around, if we could make that work it would remove the concern about accessing human eggs in any numbers”.
Accessing the thousands of human eggs needed for cloning risks the lives and wellbeing of women (through ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which killed one IVF patient last month in Britain), but the rabbit option Trounson pulled out of his hat is equally unthinkable.
Two options, then, for this wonderful new science of cloning: either commercialise women’s ovaries, putting at risk especially poorer women who will take money for their eggs – or settle for animal-human hybrid clones.
No human cloning! Cloning violates our humanity, not only in creating embryos who have no identifiable human mother – just an emptied out egg nearly devoid of her genetic identity – but in proposing the further dehumanisation of an animal egg where the mother’s egg should be.
The inhuman abuses of cloning are only just reaching public consciousness. Enough of the ducking and damage control by Muncie, ex-Premier Carr and others: let the truth of this filthy science be out.
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